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Maria Lisella

Jan 05, 2013

We honor January, 2013 as the opening month of Anno Della Cultura Italiana (Year of Italian Culture) featuring an Italian American poet. Italian Americans have added the luster of their parents' country with the passion and glitter of America. Several poets have been journalists. Louise Bogan, formerly Poet Laureate of the U.S. wrote for the New Yorker. Another famous name is Stephen Crane who chronicled the details of the Spanish American War along with his own personal verse and stories.

Maria Lisella writes for AFAR, Fra Noi, FOX News.com, Flanders, France Guide, German Life, Global Foodie, i-italy.org [blog], NY Daily News, Sherman?s Travel, The Peak and Travel and Leisure. Not surprisingly, her poetry is poetry of the world with its noisy populations, its museums, its rough love. She's a New Yorker and carries its energy in her lines.

Several poets have been journalists. Louise Bogan, formerly Poet Laureate of the U.S. wrote for the New Yorker. Another famous name is Stephen Crane who chronicled the details of the Spanish American War along with his own personal verse and stories.

Maria Lisella writes for AFAR, Fra Noi, FOX News.com, Flanders, France Guide, German Life, Global Foodie, i-italy.org [blog], NY Daily News, Sherman's Travel, The Peak and Travel and Leisure. Not surprisingly, her poetry is poetry of the world with its noisy populations, its museums, its rough love. She's a New Yorker and carries its energy in her lines. -- Grace Cavalieri

Maria Lisella's Pushcart Poetry Prize-nominated work appears in Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). Her collection, Thieves in the Family, pending publication by New York Quarterly Books in 2013. Her work has been published in The New York Quarterly, Fox Chase Review, Mobius, Paterson Literary Review, Skidrow Penthouse and, online at Eco-Logic, First Literary Review, Future Earth, Lilly Press/River Poets Journal, New Verse News, and Pirene's Fountain, among others. She was a finalist in the competition for Queens Poet Laureate, co-curates the Italian American Writers Association literary readings at Cornelia St. Café and is a travel writer by profession.

Lisella is a charter member of Brevitas, an online poetry circle of nearly 50 poets. Twice monthly each poet submits poems no longer than 14 lines; the year culminates in the Festival of the Short Poem and an anthology publishing a select group of poems by each member. Last year's event took place at Poets House; this year marks the 10th anniversary of the event.

She has also read at many venues from Cornelia St. Cafe, to the Brooklyn Public Library, to NYU's Casa Italiana and the Yippie Museum Cafe of N.Y.

de Kooning—the Dutchman at MOMA

He was lucky in being by temperament, chronically hungry and omnivorous.

First, great yellows
swathed, brushed, smeared,
The circus is in town.

Second, slashes of red
drawing the eye to corners
for no particular reason.

Third, riotous pink
Busty Pink Angels
a hint of wicked wings.

Fourth, pink and red together
Form barracuda grins he saw
on a ladies’ magazine.

He drew, he painted, he scraped
Feminists derided his
big-bottomed Venuses.

Some said he lost his mind,
red, blue, yellow banners
fat and thin across white snow.

Ladies who lunch

at Le Bernardin prefer oysters
no larger than two inches.
Briny, muscular, manageable,
the most popular are widow's holes,
like a punch line to a dirty joke
about the world's favorite aphrodisiac.
Instead, it is named for a widow
married to a lost-at-sea whaler
who lived on the Peconic
where oysters are born, bred,
cultivated to lady-like taste.
If left alone, can live for fifteen years,
grow to foot-long sea creatures.
Almost inert, inanimate as a plant,
oysters live sealed inside shells,
filled with their own liquor.
Take one firm bite
or the creature will live on
in your stomach, say the French.
Puff your cheek with its liquor,
taste the salty air, a sweet creature.
“Slurp, never chew. Tease it,
work it with your tongue,
never sink your teeth in, goodness no.”
Yet others say, “If you swallow,
all oysters are the same.”

Lovestuck

I jog to the Borghese Gardens,
pass the zoo’s furless creatures
bound up the steps
to Cardinal Scipione's Galleria,
catch a glimpse
of the Bernini sculptures
assuming their positions
on pedestals
in time to gape
at us studying them.
They return breathless
after a bacchanalian feast,
careful not to stain
their marble bodies with blood rich wine.
I imagine Apollo rushing Daphne
who will never be caught
in her desire to stay pure and free.
Like nosey neighbors,
the figures follow the drama,
throw their heads back,
recall yesterday's spectators
peering up Apollo's crotch
wrapped by Daphne's fingers
metamorphosed into laurel leaves
that clutch the warmest part
of his smooth, marble body
staking her claim forever.

The Same

I want to tell
the little Chinese women
with the loud voices
to sit beside each other
so they don’t shout
across the car,
over my head,
shattering my space,
interrupting my reading.
I offer my seat.
The lady with the
short-cropped perm
red as a rooster’s comb
in a Chinese market
gives me a toothy grin
an essence of onions, garlic
shakes her head
from side to side like a
tai chi exercise, no, no, no
as if to say, “I may shop in Costco
wear jeans, a North Face down jacket
but you’ll never
make me a Westerner,
won’t drop
my Chinese voice
a single decibel
to suit you and your
Anglo-silence on subway cars
as if they were chapels or
worse, private property.”
I hear my grandmother’s
staccato Calabrese vowels
clang against brick walls
in an alleyway in Queens
with the same defiance,
the same pride
the same sorrow to be in America.

- M. LisellaEditor’s Choice for Allen Ginsburg Poetry Award 2006

Un Beso in Cuba [A Kiss in Cuba]

Back with your right
forward with your left
Cross body turn–press her.
Let her know it’s coming.
Ahora, enchufa!